Introducing Dr Jenny Judge, Lecturer in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

In 2023 we were thrilled to welcome Dr Jenny Judge as newly appointed Lecturer in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Dr Judge holds a PhD in Philosophy from New York University, as well as a PhD in Music from the University of Cambridge, where she was the recipient of a Fulbright Student Award. Sitting at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, her research explores the place of music in human cognition. In addition to her academic writing, she is a contributor to various newspapers and magazines, and writes essays for the program books at both Carnegie Hall and the San Francisco Symphony. She is an active musician. In this interview by Philosophy Master’s candidate Madeline Helyar, Jenny Judge discusses some of her wide-ranging research interests and teaching activities.

To start, can you tell us a bit about what first drew you to Philosophy, and specifically to Philosophy of Art?

I came to philosophy purely by accident. I enrolled at University College Cork intending to study mathematics and English: I knew I wanted a maths degree, and I had always been very keen on creative writing. But for some administrative reason, the logic of which even now escapes me, the only subjects I was allowed to pair pure maths with were economics and philosophy. I thought economics sounded dull (sorry, economists: I think differently now) so I chose philosophy as the lesser of two evils. But I very quickly fell in love with it.

My first obsession was philosophy of mind. I had a great teacher at UCC, Joel Walmsley, who got me thinking about some of the things I’m still thinking about: what minds even are, whether it makes sense at all to think of them as physical entities, whether neuroscience really settles all the issues that need settling, and what the prospects are for artificial minds, and artificial consciousness.

Music was in the picture then, too—but I hadn’t yet connected it to my philosophical interests. I was working as a musician: playing in bands, accompanying choirs, directing choirs occasionally, accompanying students for exams, that sort of thing. I didn’t really think that music had anything to do with philosophy of mind. It’s not an accident that I thought that way: philosophy of mind has historically had nothing to say about music, and the role it might play in our mental lives.

However, when I was considering what to do after university, I realised that I couldn’t just leave music out of the equation: it was too central a part of my life. So I decided to enrol at the University of Cambridge, to study for a PhD in music. The draw of the Cambridge music department in particular was that they were particularly interested in the cognitive science of music—and here, I thought, would surely be an opportunity for me to finally bring philosophy of mind to bear on musical experience.

And it was—in an indirect way. When I got to Cambridge, I discovered that nobody in the music department was interested in philosophy. But I was convinced that they should be: and so, I wrote my thesis about the various ways that empirical music psychology and philosophy of mind could benefit each other.

After that, I realised that if I had any academic home, it would be in a philosophy department—but to get a job in philosophy, I’d need a philosophy PhD. So, off I went to NYU to do a second PhD, this time in philosophy.

It was there that I finally got to bring my two interests together in what felt like a satisfying way. In conversations with my PhD advisor, Rob Hopkins, I came to realise that musical experience was structurally very similar to pictorial experience. My PhD thesis ended up being an extended argument that a piece of music is, in essence, a moving picture of feeling.

Meanwhile, I kept playing music. While playing a show in Piano’s bar in the Lower East Side one night, I met a guitarist from Connecticut called Ted Morcaldi, and we went on to form a duo that released a couple of records while I was in the US. Ted and I still work together remotely. Music is still a huge part of my life.

Can you explain a little bit more what you mean when you say a piece of music is a ‘picture of feeling’? In what ways is a piece of music like a picture?

Well, on the face of it, music and pictures seem very different. Pictures are visible; music is audible. Pictures can clearly set objects and scenes before us; music doesn’t seem capable of this. But pictorial experience and musical experience actually have a lot in common. Here are some respects in which they’re similar.

When you look at a picture of the Eiffel Tower, you come to know what the Eiffel Tower looks like, even though you’re not literally seeing the Eiffel Tower. Pictures show their objects to you in a way that doesn’t require the literal presence of the object in question. Similarly, I thought, for music. When you listen to a piece of deeply sad music, you come to understand what that particular kind of deep sadness feels like, even though no real instance of deep sadness need be present—not even yours.

This might seem like an odd claim. Surely sad music makes us sad, you might think; that’s how we know it’s sad. But notice that you can hear a piece of deeply music as being deeply sad despite not feeling anything at all: when you hear it in the supermarket, say, and think to yourself, ‘wow, that’s a very sad piece of music; I wonder why they’re playing that.’ And even when you are moved by sad music, the overall experience often feels more like exhilaration than it does like sadness. Sadness feels horrible: we want to be rid of it. But being moved by sad music doesn’t feel horrible. It’s not something of which we want to be rid.

So, I thought, just as pictures are able to show us objects and scenes without our having literally to see them, so too might music be able to show us ways of feeling without our having literally to feel those ways. And just as pictures expand our visual understanding of the world far beyond the confines of our own immediate sensory experience, so too might music be able to expand our affectiveunderstanding (that is, our understanding of ways of feeling) far beyond the confines of our own personal emotional experience. Music, I thought, might be able to show us feelings that we have never felt before: the feelings of people different from ourselves, and perhaps even feelings nobodyhas ever felt before.

Pictures are static, though. They typically show us freeze-frames of the world. But music is dynamic, and what it shows us is feeling in motion: it shows us feelings as they unfold over time, and change, and morph into other feelings. So, a piece of music is really more like a movie than it is like a static picture. Hence, the thought that a piece of music is a moving picture of feeling.

On top of your research, you’re also an active musician. What kind of music do you like to play and listen to?

That’s a tough question to answer. My tastes are pretty eclectic. I mostly play the stuff I write myself, honestly. Boring, I know. (I think it might be a trauma reaction to the hundreds of covers I’ve had to play at weddings over the years. Having to play ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ hundreds of times changes a person.)

As for what I listen to: it varies a lot. Depending on the day, it can be folk music, or prog rock, or metal, or classical, or electronic music, or hip hop, or some mad combo of all the above. A good deal of jazz, too, particularly ECM jazz (if you know, you know).

I’ve found that the more seriously I take music, the more carefully I listen, which actually means that I listen to music less often than I used to when I was younger. I can’t have it on in the background. I think that music that’s worth listening to is—well, worth listening to. It’s worth setting aside time and attention for. So, I try to carve out space for that, when I can.

Do you think it’s important as a philosopher of art to also make art?

I don’t think it’s strictly necessary. Many of the philosophers of art that I most admire have been ardent appreciators of art, but not makers of it. But I do think that making art gives you a perspective on it that you just don’t have otherwise.

This might be why I’m drawn especially to those philosophers of art who put the artist at centre stage: Susanne Langer and R. G. Collingwood in particular. I think that to understand art completely, you have to consider not just why people are drawn to it, but why people make it in the first place. A great way to do that is to be someone who feels compelled to make art.

In addition to music, your research looks at digital technology and how it impacts what we value. What do you think are some of the most significant of these impacts?

Well, I think that digital technology is impacting pretty much any aspect of life that you care to name these days. So its effects are very wide-ranging. But the one that I’m exploring at the moment is the impact that digital technology is having on experiences of value.

By ‘experiences of value’, I have in mind things like absorbing encounters with a friend, or intense conversations with someone you’ve just met, or an immersive experience of a live show. These are experiences that are simultaneously encounters with value—the moral value of another person, say, or the aesthetic value of a work of art—and also valuable in themselves.

By ‘valuable in themselves,’ I don’t necessarily mean that these experiences are pleasurable, though they might be, and often are. I mean that they are experiences we want to have, even if they’re challenging: they’re experiences that answer a deep need of ours. But I think digital technology can, and often does, undermine them.

For example, take the compulsion—which I’m sure many of us will have experienced—to start videoing a live performance with your phone, at a moment when things are going particularly well. I think that this impulse is often a reaction to how good you take the performance to be, and how keenly you feel its value—but paradoxically, yielding to the compulsion takes you out of the experience, and blocks you from accessing the value of the performance, which is what you really want at the end of the day.

I suspect that examples of this kind are all over the place—videoing your kid doing something cute; checking your phone at an intense moment in a conversation with a friend; snapping a picture of a painting in an art gallery—and my suspicion is that they reveal a lot about us, and the paradoxical nature of our desires.

This year you wrote and taught the new philosophy unit, ‘Values of Art’. What did you most enjoy about teaching this unit?

The students! They were wonderful. I was astonished by how deeply they engaged with the material, how probing their questions were, and in general by their enthusiasm for the topics we were discussing. We were talking about the various kinds of value art can have: for instance, aesthetic value, moral value, and epistemic value (can art teach you things? Help you understand things? What sorts of things?). And the students had a lot of very insightful things to say about all of this.

We read historical and contemporary philosophers, we talked about paintings and pieces of music, the students visited the NGV to look at paintings for themselves, and in general we all had a whale of a time. I can’t wait to do it again.

How has your first year living in Melbourne been? How does the art and music scene here compare to somewhere like New York?

It’s been great. The art and music scene is fantastic here. It’s not quite the same as New York, but one great thing about Melbourne compared to New York is that it’s so much more compact and livable. From where I live in the CBD, there are countless great venues and galleries within walking distance. There are a couple of areas like that in NYC (the West Village for instance), but I could never afford to live there… I feel very fortunate to be here, and am looking forward to continuing to explore the musical corners of the city in particular.

Dr Jenny Judge received a PhD in Philosophy from NYU, and a PhD in Music from the University of Cambridge. She has published on a range of topics including music, our experience of it and why we value it, as well as the philosophy and ethics of digital technology. She teaches and coordinates two second-year philosophy subjects: The Philosophy of Mind (PHIL 20033) and Values of Art (PHIL20048). She is also teaching in the first-year subject Philosophy: The Big Questions (PHIL10002).

Madeline Helyar is a Masters student in the Philosophy program. Her research interests are in the phenomenology of art and language. Her thesis aims to describe the kind of experience we have when we engage with poetry, as well as to identify the epistemic benefits of such an experience. Madeline has a background in music and creative writing, and is interested in the unique role that art can play in producing and communicating knowledge.